Primitive Brain
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Tapping When Things Are Just Too HEAVY…
Sometimes we run into something that just seems too hard to do. For different reasons it can feel as impossible as trying to lift a 10,000 lb weight. Through a lot of trail and error, I’ve learned that the first thing I need to check is my primitive brain… If my survival or primitive brain…
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Who IS that person?!?!
Who IS that person?!?! I’ve said things I cannot BELIEVE came out of my mouth. You, too? I’ve committed to myself that I would do something important to my well-being and found myself procrastinating or distracting myself with Facebook and web surfing. You, too? I’ve at times wanted to curl up in a ball, or…
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It won’t work for me.
Have you ever longed for what other people have… heard how they did it… and thought “It won’t work for me?“ That painful longing can be so painful. So disheartening! Once our brain decides we can’t get there, we feel like a little kid looking through the window into a wonderland we can never visit.…
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The Familiar Can Feel Safer Than the Better
We can understand that an old pattern is painful and still return to it when we are tired, stressed, or overwhelmed. That does not mean we secretly want the pain. It may mean the nervous system knows how to run that pattern without needing to invent anything new. The familiar is predictable. Predictability can register…
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It Takes Too Much Time!
You’d think working 120 hours a week I’d have gotten A LOT done. And I did! I worried… A LOT. I stressed… A LOT. I struggled… A LOT. I felt stuck… trapped… A LOT. I wish I’d known back then that I was stuck in a “mode” that made it impossible for me to focus…
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Difference Can Make a Community More Resilient
The primitive brain notices difference quickly. Height, weight, color, disability, movement, speech, gender expression, sexuality, clothing, energy, and unfamiliar behavior can all register before the thoughtful mind has formed a sentence. That first flicker is not a moral verdict. It is a nervous-system event. What we do next helps determine whether a community becomes more…
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Stop Creating an Emergency to Make Yourself Move
Some of us learned to mobilize only when a situation became intolerable. We wait, worry, shame ourselves, and mentally enlarge the danger until the primitive brain finally releases enough urgency to act. It can look like motivation. It often feels like an emergency we manufactured because ordinary desire did not seem powerful enough. The trouble…